I usually use vim as my text editor of choice when I’m working with different text files like configurations, build scripts, docker compose files and etc. Some time ago I started using NeoVim on my personal laptop outof curiosity and at the end I fell in love with it. So natuarally I wanted to use the same in my work setup as well. Although Fedora is my goto distro nowadays for work I have to use Windows as per company policy. However I ended up using WSL/Ubuntu for all my development work since I couldn’t live without all the nicities of Linux. This is just a casual article expalining all the unexpected errors I came across when I’m setting up NeoVim and NVChad on WSL/Ubuntu

Installation Steps

  1. Install latest Neovim version. 
    # Download and extract neovim latest
wget https://github.com/neovim/neovim/releases/latest/download/nvim-linux64.tar.gz 
tar -xzvf nvim-linux.tar.gz
sudo mv nvim-linux /opt/nvim
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/nvim /opt/nvim/bin/nvim

# Edit .bashrc or .zshrc based on your shell to replace vi/vim with nvim
alias vi=nvim
alias vim=nvim
  2. Install NvChad 
    # Backup existing config
mkdir ~/backup_nvim
cp -r ~/.config/nvim ~/backup_nvim
cp -r ~/.local/share/nvim ~/backup_nvim
cp -r ~/.cache/nvim ~/backup_nvim

# Remove old configs
rm -rf ~/.config/nvim
rm -rf ~/.local/share/nvim
rm -rf ~/.cache/nvim

# Install NvChad
git clone https://github.com/NvChad/NvChad ~/.config/nvim --depth 1 && nvim

Post Install Experience

First Hurdle

Well the very first issue I ran into was getting the correct NeoVim version. I’m running Ubuntu 20.04 on WSL and it appears that neither the official ubuntu repos or the official PPA for NVChad on LaunchPad has the latest version. So I had to resort to manually downloading the binaries from the GitHub releases and setup the symlinks and all to get NeoVim working. I know this is pretty trivial work in the world of Linux but still I got suprised when it didn’t worked because I was so used working in Fedora and I totally forgot that I’m running a bit old distro on WSL.

TLDR:

If you are running a older distro and want to use NeoVim and NvChad better to install the latest version of NeoVim using the GitHub releases instead of using your OS package manager and repositories.

Second Hurdle

So with installing the correct version completed I was looking at using nvim as my daily editor. But then only I noticed that I have a very strange issue. Nvim wasn’t allowing me to press even a single key. Pressing a single key would through a error in nvim mentioning that plugin files could not be parsed due to incorrect line endings. The error was due to plugin Lua files containing ^M for line endings rather than /n line endings expected in Linux. This was strange because I was running all the installation commands from within WSL terminal. Anyway I decided to fix the line endings with dos2linux tool and it seems to fix the problem.

The End

So with line endings issue with plugins resolved I was finally able to get nvim and NvChad up and running successfully in WSL/Ubuntu. So far I haven’t seen any other issues with the setup and I’m happily using it for most of my text editing work.